FanFic

“It won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange when I try to explain how I feel... Don’t cry for me... The truth is I never left you... Don’t keep your distance... Have I said too much?”

— Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics),

Evita, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”

“Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion... which reflects the reader’s desire to ‘fill in the gaps’ they have discovered.”

— Henry Jenkins (henryjenkins.org)

“Love is just like a water fountain. It don’t turn off and on... Sometimes when you think it’s off, baby, it just on underground.”

— Villie Oliday, “Sign and Tell Low”

“Your opening shows great promise, and yet flashy purple patches; as when describing a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana, or a stream meandering through fields, or the river Rhine, or a rainbow; but this was not the place for them. If you can realistically render a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?”

— Horace, “Ars Poetica”

“Although many board games have a jargon all their own, there is a generalized terminology to describe concepts applicable... to nearly all board games....Game Piece (or counter or token or bit or meeple or mover or pawn or man): a player’s representative on the game board....”

— Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, re: board games

“Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who love the little prince... nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has — yes or no? — eaten a rose...

Look up at the sky... Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes... If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.”

— Antoine de St. Exupery,

“The Little Prince”

“Never use exclamatory punctuation in a column.”

— anonymous free press editor

OMG! These are f’ing good graphics. It really seems like I’m walking out of a cabin into the woods.

And look at the detail! Look at those eggshell shards on the ground, under the tree right by the cabin door. You can even feel the immediate arousal of a stream of consciousness: Are these deleted fragments of a hard-boiled victual? Or the spoils of an avian dream broken? Or is it an abandoned active vehicle not necessary post its successful temporal/spatial rendezvous?

Nothing that I know of escapes my notice. I have even retained the little yellow seraka leaf that stuck to my left temple. Or was it yours? Who can own such things?

I have compassion for board game meeples. Who is your meeple of choice? A dragon eating its own tail? Or perhaps a couple of distinguished bodies melted. But mostly I fancy a meeple given merely momentary form out of endless moves slowed down to cold honey.

It could be a little girl with wooden pepper-shaker. Sitting under a white blanket, she clutches the shaker in her right hand. It has a man’s face with heavy lidded eyes painted on the top and a red heart painted on its shuddering breast.

Where is the salt vehicle? The girl doesn’t notice her own empyrean eyes and her own emblazoned fluttering heart. She only envisions a climbing up the attic stairs to a walking on a floor now solid but once porous and squishy in dreams. She peers out the square window centered in the inner triangle of the outer gabled roof. She sees below a small wooden shed surrounded by lilac color and scent. And behind the shed: an alley. In the alley she finds herself, staring into a water puddle that shows her a sun coming to live in her retina, no mere squatter. What outpours is not rain, but the salt born of meeple liberation.

An ocean ensues. An iron bird flies overhead. Inside there is a small boy clutching an action figure in his left hand, head between his legs. There is no crash. But neither is there any palpable rescue.